You Will Never Fix Society
“All good ideas, once implemented, become bad ideas.”
I’m not allowed on Twitter. So here’s some thoughts that would have been tweets that will now be poast.
I
Freedom is just a euphemism for power.
It doesn’t start that way. But it always ends that way.
Both are the ability to control the environment around you; to channel energy towards one’s own preferences.
Freedom is supposed to be the power to be left alone. “As long as it doesn’t harm anyone else”, “violence only in self defense” etc. While Power is accepted of course as power over others. To influence them. To direct them. To control or oppress them.
Most would probably say power encompasses freedom, and freedom only encompasses a subset of power.
But really, they are two heads of the same coin. Or, more accurately, two overlapping bell curves on the same axis of ability to do what you want.
And it is for this reason that freedom and self defense will always devolve into a battering ram for power and conquest.
II
“Offense and defense is a false dichotomy. In the real world, there is only maneuver warfare.” – Jason P Lowery
If someone points a gun at you, is that initiating force? What if someone just walks around with a gun and looks at you? What if someone keeps an armed bomb in their own garage next to your bedroom? What if they just blare their TV loudly every night? What if they just say no when you ask to borrow their lawn mower? At what point are you exercising your freedom in trying to get it? If you walk into their house without their permission, you are clearly violating their private property. But what if you just stand outside of it 24/7? What if you just call them every hour of every day to persuade them? At what point can they tell you to fuck off? At what point of you not fucking off are they “allowed” to shove you? At what point is it self-defense? Why? Would most people agree? Would everyone agree? Why not?
If China parks a nuclear submarine off the coast of California, is that an act of aggression? What about off the coast of Hawaii? Japan? At what point is it their right to their freedom and at what point is it exerting power over you? At what point is it defending their border and at what point is it threatening yours?
Freedom isn’t real. It’s just a subset of power. Defense isn’t real. It’s just a subset of violence. And violence is just a subset of power projection strategy.
Yes of course at the extremes it’s obvious they are “different”. But in the murky middle ground it is not. And the murky middle ground is where the real world operates.
If you can’t agree on a distinction at the median, the distinction at the tails becomes irrelevant.
Just look at the abortion debate. No pro-choice people want to murder three year olds. No pro-life people want to put you in jail for dribbling a little coom. It’s obvious that a sperm is different than a fertilized egg is different than a fetus is different than an infant is different than a child is different than an adult.
But there is no objective point at which they change from one to another. It is not a fertilized egg at 12:00AM and a human at 12:01AM. It is not “nonviable outside the womb” at 12:02AM and viable at 12:03AM. And it’s not viable at six months if you don’t factor in modern technology. And even then, it is not “viable outside the womb” if you consider “viable” being an ability to feed itself. Why do we use the former and not the latter definition of “viable”? For thousands of years humans felt about children how we feel about fetuses today. And in a decade when we can make fetuses “viable” at sixty days—or at one day—what then?
All categories are arbitrarily drawn. The tail distinction is of course not arbitrary. A fertilized egg and a child are obviously different. but the median—the point when it changes from one thing to another—is not.
Obviously. If there were some objective and universally reasonable distinction for these things, we wouldn’t still be arguing about them.
III
The powerless are obsessed with exercising power.
The powerful are obsessed only with acquiring more.
The problem with exercising power is that it costs power. When you take action, you spend power. And the more power you spend, the less power you have to acquire more.
If you want to keep someone powerless the most effective possible thing you can do is get them to take action repeatedly which they believe does something, but which actually does nothing.
It was an accident that Democracy turned out this way. But in another sense, it wasn’t. No one planned it like this, but nature knew.
Voting doesn’t “work”. Party politics doesn’t “work”. Obviously. But you only see it that way because you’re measuring the wrong thing. Deflecting energy toward voting or some other political faction instead of revolution is the only reason Democracy has survived this long. The fact that Democracy doesn’t work is the only reason it still exists.
The environmental selective pressure that governments are subject to is not “who has the happiest people?” or something gay like that. Happiness is arbitrary and completely manipulatable anyway. The environmental selective pressure that governments are subject to is “how long can you avoid revolution?”
And when your government is a one million headed hydra that defuses public frustration by redirecting it toward non-load-bearing columns; when it has no king to kill nor capitol to overthrow—and no group large enough, cohesive enough, nor committed enough to take them down even if it did—your government, or rather your oligarchy, becomes anti fragile. Unkillable. At least in all the ways we know of.
Brilliant, really.
IV
The powerless are obsessed with exercising power.
The powerful are obsessed only with acquiring more.
The problem with exercising power is that it costs power. When you take action you spend power. And the more power you spend the less power you have to acquire more.
Everyone with power is a hoarder of power.
Of course you can’t only hoard power. You must occasionally exercise it. But only when it is strategically advantageous. And less than one in one hundred opportunities to exercise power will it be a not-completed-retarded move to do so. Are you certain this is the one?
First and most importantly, you must hoard power. Especially if you are young. If you are older than ten and younger than thirty, you should be accumulating, never applying.
V
The powerless are obsessed with exercising power.
The powerful are obsessed only with acquiring more.
The problem with exercising power is that it costs power. When you take action you spend power. And the more power you spend the less power you have to acquire more.
Spend your power foolishly and you will quickly lose it. Spend your freedom foolishly and you will quickly lose it. They are no different.
Why do millennials hate boomers? Why do incels hate modern women? Why do progressives hate conservatives? Why do reactionaries hate progressives? Why does most of the rest of the world hate America?
Because they abuse their power. In large part because they are oblivious to its fragility. Or worse, oblivious they even have it at all.
The thing most likely to lose you power is to not appreciate that you have it; to not act carefully and strategically with it.
In the Christian world, claiming oppression—and marketing it well of course—is the best way to acquire power. But acting like you are oppressed when you are actually in power is the quickest way to lose it.
Those who bite the hand that feeds them will inevitably end up—once again—starving or dead.
VI
Every good idea once implemented becomes a bad idea.
Whether it’s a habit, a law, a business, an institution, or a government. No one cares anymore after it’s done. The box closed. The problem solved. The law passed. The habit implemented. The company started. The institution opened. The government erected.
And so it rots.
Because once the action is taken all that remains is inertia. The potential energy that was stored up from back when the problem was a problem—the energy that catalyzed the action—is converted into kinetic energy at the time of it. And the idea works, lives, breathes, as long as this inertia is maintained; as long as the pain of before it was born is remembered.
But attention is finite. And memory is high friction. Now that the problem is solved remembering it becomes extraneous. Focusing on problems that are no longer problems is how you get outcompeted by the people who are focusing on the problems currently at hand.
So inevitably the beforetimes are forgotten. And the trend downward begins. The more important the idea—the more pain it caused before it was made real—the longer it takes for this apogee. Which is nice. But for this same reason, because it is so fundamental, because it is like water, so inherent to the substrate of how things work, everyone assumes it is immutable. Even the rare few who see how load bearing it is see also that it has been sturdy for so long. Why would it not continue being? They see no arc nor trajectory. Just flat, steady, being.
And thus it so often it goes ignored.
It is for this reason that the most important things get the least attention. Eventually someone will of course check it. But only after they’ve checked everything else. And by then it is usually far too late.
VII
“amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics”
Every good idea once implemented becomes a bad idea.
Whether it’s a habit, a law, a business, an institution, or a government. No one cares anymore after it’s done. The box closed. The problem solved. The law passed. The habit implemented. The company started. The institution opened. The government erected.
And so it rots.
It is for this reason that all the people focused on implementing “good” social or political ideas have zero credibility with me. They are unequivocal and unsalvageable retards. Because if they had spent anytime actually studying the problem they claim to have a solution for they would understand that all the engineers that preceded them had just as good of ideas as they do. All almost anyone ever has are good ideas. Spend ten minutes in a meeting at literally any company on the planet and you will see this.
The problem is not a lack of good ideas. The problem—or the first one anyway—is that time and resources (power) are finite. You can’t fix everything. You must prioritize which problems are worth spending significant power to fix, which are worth spending minor power to manage, which you will backlog to re-evaluate future power worthiness, and which you will simply ignore.
But let us assume this is not itself a huge problem. Let us assume governments can print money and hire people and exercise power ad infinitum and suffer no consequences as all politically active people assume (you do know that even if we were all paying 100% taxes, literal slaves, we wouldn’t be able to afford even the shitty level of government services we have now, right?).
There is the other huge problem that an idea in theory and an idea and practice share almost nothing in common. Even after you’ve effectively prioritized and sought to only implement the solution to this one problem: your brilliant plan never turns out how you planned! Perhaps you had brilliant strategy but terrible logistics. Perhaps you knew exactly what the problem was, but how many other problems you have to navigate to address it makes actually solving it a massive net negative.
Yes, you probably “should” fix that oil leak in your car. But when you’re two days deep into disassembling the engine, and you’re exhausted and covered in grease and still can’t even find where it’s coming from: going back in time to just buy a $10 leak pan and accepting to spend five minutes a month topping off your oil sounds pretty appealing.
But let us ignore this even. Certainly the implementation goes without hiccup sometimes. Ten percent of the time? At least one percent of the time, right?
It still doesn’t matter. Because every good idea once implemented eventually rots. The world changes. A good idea today is a shit idea tomorrow. Often a good idea today digs its own grave, changing tomorrow, so that it is now a shit idea.
It was a great idea to eat that delicious dinner you made last night. Will it still be a great idea to eat it a week from now? How about a month from now? Ideas, systems, laws may keep longer than food, but not by as long as you think. Entropy is a ruthless (and enduring) bitch.
But let us ignore this even!!! Let us assume even further than tomorrow doesn’t change; that you not only prioritized the right idea and executed it effectively but also that your idea remains as good tomorrow and next week and even next year as it is today. There’s this other problem bigger even than that one: that your idea wasn’t actually all that good in the first place. Don’t get me wrong: It was beautiful and elegant and brilliant as far as anyone could tell. The smartest people looked at it and could find nothing wrong with it. But that is only because we are all too dumb and naïve and biased to see all the ways in which it will be gamed, misused, corrupted, bypassed, reinterpreted, exploited, and repurposed.
Society is not a car and a law is not a mechanical repair. Society is a gun and a law is who you choose to point it at.
Society is a complex system and its participants are animate. And just like you they all want more for less. More control. More power. For less energy. Less time.
When you point a gun at someone yes you do achieve their compliance. At least in the short term. “Yay we fixed society!!!” No. You have actually doomed it. That guy or group you pointed the gun at? You just made them an enemy for life whose sole goal becomes now to destroy you.
Just look around and tell me this is not the state of every political faction in history. Some group gets power, uses that power to enforce their vision, this oppresses some other group, other group gets resentful, start scheming to take that power, has some kind of revolution, inverts the power structure, now oppresses the original power. Now original is resentful and trying to reclaim power, sometimes succeed sometimes not. Cycle perpetuates regardless. If it’s not the original power inverting the pyramid, it’s some brand new one.
Democracy—electing left then right then left then right—is just a miniature form of this. It is like a revolution but in the way that smacking a broken bone with a hammer is setting it. ie It isn’t. And it’s actually worse because the wound never heals. It just perpetually festers.
If you’re going to point your gun at the king you better kill him. If you can’t kill him then trying to get control of the gun is only signing your own death certificate. And since the king is actually a one million headed unkillable hydra the only way you’re getting out of this alive is to stay as far away from him as you possibly can.
VIII
Every good idea once implemented becomes a bad idea.
Whether it’s a habit, a law, a business, an institution, or a government. No one cares anymore after it’s done. The box closed. The problem solved. The law passed. The habit implemented. The business started. The institution opened. The government erected.
And so it rots.
Allow me to illustrate this truth using something that—in comparison to how to organize society and the complexity of incentives involved—is retard level easy: game development.
Game developers are at bare minimum twice as good at building games as literally any political interested person is at building societies. Most games spend years in development by hundreds of highly talented developers, all who have the unencumbered (at least from major conflicts of interest) directive of making the game work; who even daily ask themselves “how do we make sure this thing does what we want it to do?”, and working hard to prioritize and execute effectively.
And yet still, literally within a week of release, under basically zero incentive—no financial gain nor loss, no threat to life liberty nor property, but rather just because they are fucking bored—a bunch of nerds will find a way to completely break it.
I still don’t think this example—where the rule maker has near maximum incentive to make it work and the rule breaker has near minimum incentive to break it and yet still it can’t even survive a week—illustrates the true magnitude of this problem.
This is not one of those “exceptions that prove the rule” types of situations. Nor even one of those “the rule rather than the exception” types. It is one of those “Exceptions literally don’t even exist” types of situations. Every single game in gaming history, every single software in software history, sport in sporting history, law in lawing history, and rule in ruling history. All have been and will be broken in some way their developers didn’t intend—no matter how hard they try—literally as soon as they implement it.
Cyber Security 101: Defending yourself from attackers is exponentially harder than being an attacker. Because an attacker only has to find one way to get in. While you have to find every conceivable way any attacker could possibly ever get in and preemptively patch it. This is why nerds in their basement with one-one-billionth the capital can hack the FBI. Or why a few 80 IQ kebabs with RPGs can defeat the worlds strongest military. Or why pretty much every software patch ever pushed or law ever passed is just as much a cause of a new problem as a solution to an old one.
Building incorruptible systems is not only hard, it’s impossible. Or at least such is the case if you don’t start with this assumption in mind.
And yet here you are. Thinking your game—which has never even been playtested!—is going to defy all of history, reason, logic, game theory, and incentive and just work right out of the box. And you’re so unbelievably certain of it that you have never even once asked anything close to “how will we check, after implementation, to ensure it is working as expected?” Your dumb ass methodology already killed three hundred million people in the last century—several orders of magnitude more than any in human history—and yet your conviction in “it will work this time!! for realzies!!” endures unabated.
Sorry but: if that doesn’t make you a retard, I don’t know what does.
If you want even a semblance of a chance to maybe make a political change that doesn’t instantly backfire and make the problem infinitely worse, then the literal last thing you need to worry about is what change you actually want to make.
The first thing you need to worry about is: How do we know if ideas we implemented actually worked? How do we depreciate the good ideas when they start being bad ideas? How do we know when closed boxes need to be opened again? How do we know the last idea we implemented didn’t actually make the problem worse? How do we know the last idea we implemented didn’t actually cause this new problem we’re having now?
Any government—whether it be Democratic, Republican, libertarian, authoritarian, white nationalist, communist, progressive, monarchist, or whatever the hell else you think is the “ultimate utopia that will fix everything”—which is not first and foremost built to be able to measure whether a change we made actually created the result we hope is RETARDED.
It’s probably the case that literally all of these systems are viable. They all have pro’s and con’s, benefit some groups at the expense of others, meet some needs at the expense of others. But none of this matters, until someone—anyone—starts thinking from first principles about:
How do we ensure that the practice is an actual implementation of the theory?
How do we measure whether our good ideas actually achieved good results?
How do we ensure that the good ideas that achieve good results continue doing so?
How do we effectively remove, update, or replace ideas which are no longer doing what we hoped?
What does it even mean for results to be good? Good for whom? Good for how long? Good compared to what?
Until politically interested people start thinking about these questions before they propose anything else, theorizing about society and politics and governance will continue do be just a dumb drug for bored and depressed losers.
Good dae.